One of our most popular reports is the Lifepath and Destiny Report. If you would like to sample this revealing report for yourself simply click on the link below. This will enable you to gain exclusive access to the first part of your personal astrology report for free and give you an idea of what your report will contain.

1. Every magician has a beautiful vision for the world.
2. Every system of magic is a single artists tool, used to reshape reality.
3. If you believe, it shall exist.
4. When you call, they will answer.
5. Success and failure, is one and the same: ignorance and depression is the enemy.
6. Be like all equally, and you shall unite; refuse and separate.

The Herald-Tepaphone is the quarterly newsletter of IAO Camp, a duly chartered body of Ordo Templi Orientis. The HT is published on the Equinoxes and Solstices. Subscriptions are $5.00 per issue or $16.00 for one year (4 issues), make checks or money orders payable to Bowyer.

Membership in IAO Camp and/or O.T.O. is not required to subscribe or to submit material. Text submissions may be sent on paper or on 3.5 in. disk for WordPerfect or Microsoft Word (preferably on Macintosh), illustrations had better be on paper at present. All copyrights reside with the individual authors.

The opinions expressed herein are the sole responsibility of the individual authors and do not necessarily reflect those of IAO Camp, the Ordo Templi Orientis, or of anyone else.

Hello and welcome to the first issue of the Herald-Tepaphone, the newsletter that brings a whole new meaning to the term deadline. We will be coming to you four times a year with news, articles, rituals, rants, reviews, and anything else our jaded and depraved minds can think of.

This newsletter is, like it says up there under the title, primarily the vehicle of IAO Camp, however anyone interested is more than welcome to subscribe and/or submit material for publication (in fact, at least one such person has already done so). You do not have to be a member of the Camp, or even of O.T.O., to join in, so please feel free.

King is Dead! We have just received word that Francis Xavier (In-1903-Crowley Received-the-Book-of the-Law) King shuffled off this mortal coil in London last November. While there will doubtless always be superficial writers on occult history who subtly patronize and disparage their subjects while exemplifying sloppy scholarship and somehow become regarded as authorities in the process, at least now we have one less to deal with. If the Gods are kind, this may actually leave room for someone who really does know and respect the subject to get published.

Notes on the History of Liber 365 or; The Bornless Ritual

by the Non-existent Brother R. B.

A well-known authority on modern ceremonial Magick recently made the astonishing claim that the Preliminary Invocation which appears in the 1904 Crowley-Mathers edition of the Goetia is based on the Golden Dawn paper Bornless Ritual for the Invocation of the Higher Genius. This is wildly inaccurate, since the Bornless Ritual published in The Golden Dawn is not only not a G.`.D.`. paper, but is in fact based on the Preliminary Invocation, not vice versa. The Bornless Ritual in The Golden Dawn is one of Regardie's purely personal productions and was composed sometime in the latter 1930s.

I thought it might be of benefit to the well-known authority mentioned above, and to less renowned scholars in this field, to write up some of my notes on the history of this important ritual. Please bear in mind that these are only notes, part of an ongoing study of the subject, and certainly not my final judgments. The story of our ritual begins sometime around the fourth century of the Vulgar Era, when a Hellenized Egyptian writes it down as part of a cookbook of magical incantations, all of them well-seasoned with barbarous names. In fact, several of the barbarous names employed in our ritual appear in the other incantations. The ritual, in its original form, is an exorcism. This cookbook -- or at least part of it -- ends up in the British Museum and is now known as Papyrus Londonensis 46: this is the primary source from which the modern versions of this ceremony are ultimately descended.

The story continues with Charles Wycliffe Goodwin's Fragment of a Graeco-Egyptian Work upon Magic, which appears in the Publications of the Cambridge Antiquarian Society, no 2, in 1852. Goodwin provides a transcription of the Greek text of P. Lond. 46, with a facing-page translation and notes: this secondary source, rather than the manuscript itself, is the basis for the modern redactions of the ritual.

In 1899 E. A. W. Budge, the G.`.D.`.'s favorite Egyptologist, publishes his Egyptian Magic. Included in this book (a tertiary source, for those who are keeping score) is the opening passage of our ritual, quoted from Goodwin's translation. Some G.`.D.`. initiate -- I presume Mathers himself, though as yet I have no proof of this -- reads Budge's book and is sufficiently impressed by the opening passage to look up the complete text in Goodwin's book: from the text in Goodwin he creates the redaction with which we are primarily concerned, the Preliminary Invocation of the Goetia.

The earliest references (which I have found so far) to this ritual in its modern form are connected with Crowley's performance of it in the King's Chamber of the Great Pyramid, November 22, 1903. On this occasion he is obliged to read the text, which suggests he is not very familiar with the ritual at this date. Fuller's account of the event refers to the ceremony as the ritual of the Bornless One, but Crowley himself nearly always speaks of it as the Preliminary Invocation of the Goetia, suggesting that he has always considered the two as linked (and thus further suggesting that he received them together from Mathers?).

In 1904, Crowley publishes Goetia, including as Preliminary Invocation our ritual, as redacted from Goodwin's text: this is, then, a tertiary source. The great difficulty with this edition is that the Preliminary Invocation is set in Caxton Blackletter, described justly by our well-known authority as perhaps the most illegible typeface ever devised; it is very difficult to read, and many letters look just like other letters except under careful scrutiny. The letter x, for example, is only distict from the letter r by a tiny flourish at the bottom of the letter, so that if you don't know the intricacies of the typeface, the word Abrasax looks like Abrasar.

In 1916, the American pirate publisher L. W. DeLaurence produces his unauthorized edition of the Goetia. This is merely a reprint of the 1904 edition, with some deletions and a number of errors: i.e., it is a quaternary source. This edition sets the Preliminary Invocation in an easy-to-read typeface, but the typesetter is, unfortunately, not initiated into the mysteries of Caxton Blackletter: where the word Abrasax appears in the 1904 edition, it appears in the 1916 edition as Abrasar. There are several other errors, all apparently due to the illegibility of the type in the 1904 edition.

In 1921, Crowley writes his personal redaction of the Preliminary Invocation, which he titles Liber Samekh. Crowley's version is based on the 1904 Goetia, with a few changes which seem to be intentional. This is another quaternary source, and it is published in 1929/1930 as Appendix IV of Magick in Theory and Practice.

Next, in 1932, Regardie publishes a version of the Preliminary Invocation titling it the Bornless Invocation -- in his book The Tree of Life. His redaction is obviously based on the corrupt text of the 1916 Goetia, but it also includes a note that seems to echo Crowley's notes to Samekh. It is, therefore, a quinary source based on two quaternary sources, and it includes a few new errors of its own.

Finally we come to the redaction of the ritual which our well-known authority supposes to be the original. Sometime in the late 1930's, while an Adeptus Minor of the Stella Matutina, Regardie writes a ritual for spiritual development which he calls Bornless Ritual for the Invocation of the Higher Genius, based on his own 1932 Bornless Invocation. This new version corrects most of the errors unique to the 1932 version, but retains two of them, which makes this a senary source; i.e., it is a text (1941) based on a text (1932) based on a text (1916) based on a text (1904) based on a text (1852) based on the original manuscript (4th century, more or less). Regardie includes this ritual in his 1937 - 40 Golden Dawn, as an example of how G.`.D.`. technique can be adapted to a variety of purposes.

The attentive reader will already have noticed that I avoid the common name for this ceremony, the Bornless Ritual. The reason is that the only one of these many versions which is actually called Bornless Ritual is Regardie's personal adaptation (1937), which is considerably more elaborate than the Preliminary Invocation on which it is based. In other words, Bornless Ritual should not be used as a generic term for all versions of this ceremony, because it is properly applied to only one version (which is, moreover, the least typical of all the modern versions). A more acceptable -- if less common -- name is Liber 365, the official classification of the Preliminary Invocation of the Goetia.

These are, let me repeat, only rough notes. Further details, possible criticisms and my responses, evidence which might contradict my assumption that Mathers created our modern redaction of the ritual, comparisons of the various versions from 1852 - 1937, and comparisons of Goodwin's text with more recent scholarship, are all appropriate subjects for future articles.

Combining Orgone Accumulators and Ritual Magick: A Preliminary Report

by Fr. In Profunda III`

I have recently embarked on what promises to be a rather interesting series of Workings that combine traditional ceremonial technique with modern techno-Magick. My partner in thaumaturgy is the local Discordian mage, Tom Madai (or, to give his full title, His High Irreverence Pope John-Paul-George-and-Ringo XXIII). Tom's system involves direct manipulation of abstract energies in a manner not unlike Reiki, with a good dose of quantum theory thrown in. In the course of his research he recently built an orgone accumulator and the two of us are now using it in tandem with more-or-less traditional ceremonial Magick.

For those readers not familiar with the subject, orgone is a term coined by the late psychologist Wilhelm Reich to describe what others call life-force, prana, psychic energy, etc. The orgone accumulator, one of many gadgets he designed to use this energy, is simply a box with nested layers of organic and inorganic material that automatically accumulates and stores this energy. Tom's accumulator is a simple two layer affair of wood and sheet metal about 2.5 feet square and 1 foot high. Before we began our joint project Tom had already satisfied himself that his machine worked as advertised, and that orgone is the same energy used in Magick. His next idea was to use it in ritual, which is where I came in.

Our first experiment took place in my living room. The device began to do its thing as soon as we set it up, generating a field about five feet across as verified by Tom's clairvoyance and my dowsing. This field expanded quickly to fill the whole room even before a formal Circle was cast. My Star Ruby solidified and intensified the field dramatically. Among other things, the accumulator was used to charge what was supposed to be a regular four-hour candle; when lit it lasted at least six hours (unfortunately, I fell asleep before it burnt out, so the exact figure eludes me). The burn-out was complete with, however, a good deal of melt-off.

I deliberately refrained from taking down the Circle after the Working in order to study its evolution over time after the accumulator was removed. Within a few days my dowsing disclosed that not only was the Circle still there, but that it had assumed a complex vortex structure with concentric rings. This is similar to what some dowsers find in megalithic stone circles such as Stonehenge and Rollright in Britain. This did not especially surprise me as I am aware that many ancient earthworks have a structure not unlike an orgone accumulator, in this case using layers of turf or peat and clay or stone rather than wood and metal. These earthworks also seem to accumulate energy, possibly for weather-control, which was another of Reich's projects.

This ritual is to be used whenever desired, in order to attune the Magician to the union of opposites in his or her nature.

The Temple

A large Circle is traced on the Temple floor, 13 feet in diameter. A white pillar is placed at the southern edge of the Circle, a black pillar at the northern edge. At the base of the white pillar, on its western side, is burning a single candle. At the base of the black pillar, on its western side, is a cup or basin of water. Incense of Abramelin, and none other, is burning outside the Circle. The Magician

The Magician is attired in the robe of his degree, or otherwise in an unadorned black robe. The Ritual

The Magician stands in the center of the Circle, facing East. Assuming the Sign of Mulier, he intones:

A ka dua Tuf ur biu Bi a'a chefu Dudu nur af an nuteru. [He faces East to symbolize his aspiration to the Unity, in Nothingness, of Nuit.]

He then performs the Lesser Banishing Pentagram Ritual of Earth, describing the Circle on the floor as he cicumambulates. He returns to the center of the Circle, facing East. He Says:

O Nuit, continuous one of Heaven, let it be ever thus; that men speak not of Thee as One but as None; and let them speak not of thee at all, since thou art continuous!

None, breathed the light, faint & faery, of the stars, and two.

For I am divided for love's sake, for the chance of union.

This is the creation of the world, that the pain of division is as nothing, and the joy of dissolution all.

He then turns clockwise and advances in a straight line to the white pillar, taking up the candle, making the triangle of Fire before him with the candle while facing West and saying:

I consecrate with Fire.

He then turns clockwise and advances in a straight line to the black pillar, taking up the basin of water, making the triangle of Water before him (by sprinkling the water with thumb, index and medius) while facing West, and saying:

I purify by Water.

He moves back to the center of the Circle, facing West.

He begins reciting a series of opposites, given below. For the first of each pair, he raises his left hand to the South while speaking the word. For the second of each pair, he raises his right hand to the North while speaking the word. Thus, after both opposites are recited, he is standing again in the Sign of Mulier. [He should, as completely as possible, identify himself with the words as he speaks them, as if he is creating magnetic poles to his left and right (the pillars), with the force of his identification.]

Then, concentrating and sending forth the energy of the unification of these opposites, he gives the Sign of the Enterer while intoning sharply:

Achad!

He visualizes the projection of the energy to the circumference of the Circle, where it begins to transform the Circle into a sphere of brilliant white light. He retires in the Sign of Silence, the right hand to the lips.

With each pair, the intensity of the sphere's light has increased, corresponding with the Will of the Magician's divided self to unite, with Love, into a circle of Naught. [He is finally allowing the magnetized poles to slam together, having increased their attraction to each other, and the tension between these opposites, through the previous words.] He assumes the Sign of Mulier, this time facing West to symbolize his attainment of Union, as if identifying with Nuit. At the moment of climax, he slowly brings his arms down to cross his breast, right over left, forming the Sign of Osiris Risen, while he intones:

IAO.

The opposite energies are brought down with the arms, and are concentrated in the heart of the Magician, which is imagined to be the center of the sphere, where the arms are crossed. When this Union is fully experienced, the Magician says:

Love is the Law, love under will.

Then, turning clockwise to the East, again in the Sign of Mulier, he intones:

A ka dua Tuf ur biu Bi a'a chefu Dudu nur af an nuteru.

The ritual is ended.

Notes

* The Sign of Mulier can also be considered as a representation of Baphomet, as a symbol of the union of opposites.

* The technique used in the litany of opposites is not unlike parts of Liber Pyramidos, where the Magician identifies, in rapid succession, with opposite energies, or states of conciousness. Interestingly, this technique is sometimes used in hypnosis to deepen trance. It seems to work because the person in trance is shifted so quickly between one state and another that he or she slingshots past them into a deeper state altogether. This is exactly the object of this ritual, so one can readily see that the key to its proper performance is the effectiveness of the Magician's indentification with the opposites recited.

* Although pillars are used, they are not to be considered as strictly representative of the familiar Qabalistic/Masonic pillars. Some of the opposites recited fall readily into the Qabalistic attributions to the pillars. Others, such as God and Man, do not. The point to be made is simply that the pairs can be considered opposite for the purpose of the ritual. They may not be opposites along the same continuum, and they may not always be opposites!

* While the concept of opposites is clearly expressed in the litany and by the presence of the pillars, the concept of Unity (as Ain) is addressed in other aspects of the ritual. The Circle/Sphere is the most prominent of these. The Circle is 13 feet in diameter, and since 13 is the number of AChaD (Unity), the circle is reaffirmed by the vibration of AChaD with each pair, and by the fact that there are 13 pairs. Multiplying 13 pairs by 2 words per pair (Unity through duality), we get 26. This connects the supreme goal of the ritual to the Formula of Tragrammaton [YHVH], although this ritual is more explicitly based on one interpretation of the IAO formula, where I and O are the opposites which form the field for the operation of A (see Magick in Theory and Practice under The Formula of IAO). Furthermore, by the end of the ritual the Magician has built the sphere and has identified a point at his heart as the sphere's center. This is one final affirmation of union through love under will, as it represents the union of the point and the circle, Hadit and Nuit.

Love is the Law. love under will.

Top Ten Rejected Newsletter Titles

10. The Aleister Crowley Fanclub Newsletter 9. Everything Worth Knowing 8. Old Farts in Turbans 7. Slobber 6. Blood of the Moon Monthly 5. Hoosier Thelemite Quarterly 4. Gack 3. We Don't Care how They do it in New York 2. Samekh Final 1. Brain-Rotting Bak-Bak

Javacrucian Communique In the year 1592 of the Vulgar Era, His Holiness, Pope Clement VIII officially declared Coffee to be a Christian beverage. Originally introduced by Arab merchants, the Holy Bean had been regarded by many as the wine of infidels.

Typhonian Tomes:Being a Guide to the Works of Kenneth Grant by Frater In Profunda III`

If this were a comedy segment on The Late Show with David Letterman, Paul Shaffer would come up with some campy Vegas-esque theme-music for the occasion, something like this:

Oh, those Cults! Yeah, those crazy Cults, Those crazy, crazy, crazy Cults of the Shadow-w-w-w! So if the Reader will supply the music we may proceed.

With its predecessors, The Magical Revival and Aleister Crowley and the Hidden God, Cults of the Shadow forms Kenneth Grant's Typhonian Trilogy dealing with various schools of sexual Magick. This time he presents his interpretation of several such "Cults" (Grant has a perverse affection for lurid terminology) and attempts to show them as parts of one primordial Current.

Grant first discusses a number of West African/Voudon deities, linking them to appropriate Paths on the Tree of Life. This part is quite interesting and well done, but Grant spoils it by insisting that these are the prototypes of the Ancient Egyptian pantheon. There is just not enough resemblance; and if there were, would it not make more sense if the ancient Egyptian Gods were the ancestors of the modern African dieties? After all, just because Africans are supposedly primitive does not mean their religions have remained unchanged for 6,000-plus years.

Grant then gives a rather peculiar history of Egyptian religion (one can't help thinking it would have helped to consult even one book on Egyptology published since 1907), and moves on to Tantra. He maintains that Hindu Tantra was imported from Egypt, citing some implausable bits of etymology to prove it: Egyptian Bast and Sekhmet to Sanskrit Pashu and Shakti for example. While this may look good in print at first glance, Ancient Egyptian and Sanskrit are very different languages from very different families, and the actual pronunciation of Egyptian is far from certain anyway. So it will take more than a few lucky similarities to convince me.

Grant still focuses on one Tantric Tradition to the exclusion of all others. He also performs some rather odd feats of logical gymnastics. He joins orthodox Tantrics in denouncing Prayoga, whereby intercourse is had with Succubi, yet he later advocates his personal method of dream-control which involves exactly that!

Finally he comes to more contemporary sects with two chapters on Crowley and Thelema (which he insists on calling The Cult of the Beast.) Much of this is devoted to legitimising Grant's Typhonian O.T.O. He denounces formal Initiations as mere copies of masonic rituals having little magical value, eliminates Lodges in favour of power-zones and generally scuttles all of Crowley's ideas for the reform of society. Grant states that the O.T.O. devotes itself to Kundalini Yoga and establishing a gate in space through which the extraterrestrial or cosmic energies may enter in and manifest on earth. Trans-Plutonic planets and the star Sirius figure largely in Grant's personal-mythology-presented-as-objective-fact.

He then deals with the career of Charles Stansfield Jones, better known as Crowley's Magical son Frater Achad, who had such a promising start -- he discovered the secret key to Liber AL -- and then went off the deep end. By 1926 Achad decided that Crowley was unable to utter the Word for the aeon of Horus because, having identified himself with the Beast, he became inarticulate. So Achad came up with a Word of his own, which appearently didn't work because in 1948 he announced a whole new aeon, that of Maat or Ma-Ion! Achad is an excellent example of ego-abcess and paranoid obsession, besides being the first Thelemic heretic. The major problem in this chapter is that Grant's commentary is so unclear it's hard to tell if he is simply reporting Achad's theories or actually supporting them.

The book ends with a short piece on Austin Spare's Zos-Kia Cultus, but before that we get two chapters on something new: Michael Bertiaux's La Couleuvre Noire (the Black Snake Cult.) This is a (theoretically) Voudon-oriented group centred in Chicago. I say theoretically because there is little recognisable Voudon in it - Bertiaux is incredibly eclectic and has a fetish for pseudo-technical jargon that must be seen to be believed. The curious reader may consult the Voudon Gnostic Workbook, a collection of Bertiaux's correspondence courses that is about the size of a large city's phonebook -- and has about the same literary and Magical value, if that. Grant quotes mostly Lovecraft-oriented material in this section.

Grant's style remains consistent in terms of scholarship (damn little) and peculiar expressions (lots.) For those keeping score here are the new ones: efflorescence, Uranography, co-types, infra-liminal vibration, audile, comports, and the truly amazing sexo-somniferous magnetization. All I can say is that this book is better than Bob Larson's Guide to Cults, but I won't put it on any recommended reading lists anytime soon.

(The previous two installments of this series appeared in Volume IV of the Midwest OTO Tribal Diary, interested parties may write the H-T for copies. The next installment will cover Images and Oracles of Austin Osman Spare.)

Fax God It has long been a custom to tuck written prayers to God into the crevices of the Wailing Wall in Jerusalem. Now Bezeq Telecommunications Corporation in Israel has set up a special fax line for those who can't make the trip in person. The faxes come from all over the world and are taxen to the Wall by a special messenger once each day. So far, the longest fax ran to 40 pages.

These folks represent the Isis-Urania Covens, a Canadian group of Egyptian Qabalistic Witches who tend the flame of Traditional Wicca. Their system, needless to say, is incalculably older than the innovations of Bro. Gardner, and of course is the very old and unbroken traditional European lineage, etc., etc., -- you've heard all this before.

Their ancient Book of Shadows sounds strikingly similar to Doreen Valiente's versification of Bro. Gardner's work, and some of their traditional aphorisms could be mistaken for paraphrases of Dion Fortune. They study Qabalah because it's astonishingly similar to their own system, and sketch a hilarious picture of Medieval Witches and Qabalistic Jews fleeing persecution together and then casually comparing their secret doctrines while hiding out in the forest: this was clearly the re-establishment of a long-forgotten alliance. Yeah, right.

This is a fun little story of sorcery in the Middle Ages. The fact that it often reads like advance-promo for Bro. Gardner's later books on Wicca merely adds to its charm and interest for the student of occultism. The plot involves a fairly unlikely alliance between a Pagan Witch and a Christian Mage (yeah, right again), and just maybe a few too many sneers at the Church (or maybe not), but it's still fun. Although it is. married throughout by, erros of punctuation and of orthografy; typical of Bro. Gardner. Or perhaps a pour jab ov edithing on teh pert of Samael Wiser.

Then again, since we are dealing not with an ordinary novelist but with an Initiate, we must not rule out the possibility that these are Qabalistic Mistakes which secretly point to mighty arcana. For example, on p. 268 a spirit is conjured through HIM who half created all things. The casual reader will giggle at the obvious misprint of half for hath, but the Qabalist will ponder deeply: if HIM half-created all things, then who created the other half? Perhaps HER? The Torah tells us that ELOHIM is the author of Creation, so we can conclude that if HIM created half, ELO created the rest. This interpretation is supported by the Scripture, for we read that the Creation is two-fold -- In the beginning ELOHIM created the Heavens and the Earth.

And ELOHIM perfectly expresses this two-in-one idea of Deity, as it consists of the feminine Eloah with the masculine plural ending -im. But I digress...